Scarlet Letters

Okay, normal people do not have these dreams. I dreamed that I met with an agent who had brokered a deal for another collection of short stories. She had everything in place, including a cover, and I had a week to get the stories together. "But I don't have enough short stories for a collection!" I protested, but she didn't care. "Write them," she insisted. Then I talked Steven Shrewsbury into writing the introduction on the horror short story as an art form, probably because my subconscious is still intimidated by Shrews' 350 published stories. Dream-Shrews was very agreeable. Less agreeable were nameless editors I was contacting to get rights back to some of my short stories so they could be reprinted in this collection. Which is funny, because I actually have the rights to much of my stuff by now. I think. I spent the whole dream in a panic attack about getting this thing together by my fictional agent's unrealistic deadline. When I awoke, I was r...

SUNDAY My wonderful minions (I even bought them MINION buttons) were so understanding about letting me free from booth duty. The first panel of the day was on constructing a space combat game that actually follows Newtonian physics. Now, I'm not constructing a game, but I am constructing space combat. So I attended the panel with Professor Rob Knop, designated physics nerd, and took notes on how Newtonian physics would apply to space travel and combat. It's always humbling to be the dumbest one in the room. Everyone knew more about physics than me, including the teenager in the back. I took Physics for Dummkompfs in tenth grade and passed, fleeing it for molecular biology as fast as I could manage. I got about 80 percent of what Rob was saying, mostly because he was patient with my stupid questions. I still don't quite get why we can't go faster than light, because I don't get how space and time are tied together, because I'm not fuckin' Einstein. But I thin...

SATURDAY I love Hypericon for many reasons, but one of the top reasons is that His Fredness never schedules anyone before 10 a.m. This is one of the many reasons we love Fred. But I was hunting Fred, because there was a zombie panel at 1 p.m. and I wasn't on it. Now, it wasn't Fred's fault, per se - he couldn't know that I had a zombie novella coming out because nobody knew it - I was announcing it at the con. But I wanted on that panel. Keep in mind, Fred likes to give me shit. I'm noticing this trend among my closest friends and certainly my family. Those who like me the best give me the most shit. I'm all sweet and gentle to them, and this is what I get? I swear, I don't know what the world is coming to. *ducks* Because I know the best way to find Fred is to find his wife Stephania, I went to the con suite. Stephania dashed my hopes, said she can't keep track of Fred at con without a bell around his neck. So I grabbed a diet soda instead and who shoul...

FRIDAY All right, enough silliness. Time to work. Flunkies lined up, we proceeded to the con for booth setup. The work Katie and I did clearing out all the detritus really paid off. The boothstuff was reduced to one rolling box of doom, and Katie organized all the books by title into fewer boxes, eliminating the endless trips to the car and the annoying jumble behind the booth. Brava Katie. Therefore booth setup was much less painful than previous shows. I really like our design this year: Louisiana gothic, with moss-green crinkled not-silk draperies, cobweb black lace toppers, creepy-fabric accents on the racks and strings of little human skulls. What's that you say? I've got a dark-fantasy swamp romp coming out next month? Well, I suppose it's a coincidence! The new display for the buttons worked amazingly well, especially when propped against the box of stained glass, which looks very nice on the black lace (too bad I can't auto-generate a window behind every booth, ...

How does one write up a blast like Hypericon? It's like a crazy, inebriated and decidedly geeky family reunion, except you like these people. WEDNESDAY The boy and I got a spectacularly late start - thanks, all you sources that waited until 4:30 p.m. to call me back. I spit my last breath at thee. With a little extra spit-up for UPS, which was delivering a box of SETTING SUNS and thought 5 p.m. was a good delivery time. I almost left without it, except SS is perennially my best seller. I was on four hours' bad sleep, as I always have - ahem - performance anxiety before cons. I'm shy. And to be honest, I've had more than a little insecurity about my career of late, given the massive writer's block, the book that hates hates hates me and last year's publication setbacks. Whinge whinge complain bitch. This one was a big mess to organize, what with two cons the same weekend. The lovely and talented Miss Katie handled DieCon in St. Louis while I was gallivanting abou...